Lutz stood right next to the tall oak tree, its canopy of leaves casting a wide
shade around him. It was a bright, warm Spring day, the type of day that would
encourage most people to kick off their shoes and curl up under the tree -- or
better yet, climb up in it -- with a good book. Lutz, however, did not lazily
lean against the tree. He did not even touch it. He simply used it as a
physical cover as he gazed across the campus of Palma University in Camineet at
the twenty-year old girl who had just emerged from Luveno Hall.

Andrea Dahlia Larson.

Her dark brown hair just barely touched her shoulders, swaying back and forth
as she walked from the building with two schoolbooks in her arms, two
schoolmates with her. The boy to her right suddenly said something Lutz could
almost hear, animating his words with his arms as he spoke. Andrea and the
girl to her left burst into laughter at the boy's apparent joke.

Lutz's eyes narrowed.

[Andrea Larson!] he called out to her mind. She reacted immediately, looking
around briefly before locking her eyes on Lutz, across the lawn from where she
and her friends stood near the doors to Luveno Hall. She glanced to her
friends, dismissed herself, and started walking his way. Lutz moved to meet
her halfway, his legs taking giant strides, his eyes never for one moment
ceasing to drill into hers.

When he reached her, he spun on his heels and walked with her back towards the
tree he had been hiding near. "You have much to explain, young lady," were
Lutz's first crisp words.

"And hello to you, as well, Master Lutz," Andrea replied, absolutely no remorse
in her voice, no guilt at what she had done. The words and the tone only made
Lutz grit his teeth in more anger.

[Do you have any idea what you have done?] Lutz asked her telepathically; he
didn't trust himself enough right now to keep his voice low.

"Of course I do," Andrea replied.

[You may think your answers; I will read them from your mind.]

"Thank you for the option, but I prefer to speak aloud."

Lutz stopped walking, spun on his heels to stand before her. His eyes were
like the front drills of the largest ice digger on Dezoris. [Watch your
tongue, young lady.]

"Young lady?" Andrea scoffed. "You're not all that much older than me.
Physically, anyway."

[You are in enough trouble as it is. I would recommend you do not make it
worse for yourself.]

She glanced behind him, over his shoulder. "Where are we going?"

[Where do you think?] Lutz replied. [We're going to a safe place, and then
we're teleporting home.]

"No," Andrea said slowly, shaking her head. "No, thanks for the offer, but I
think I'll pass."

"It was not an offer!" Lutz chomped out the words.

"I knew it!" Andrea clapped one hand on top of her schoolbooks. "I knew I
could get you to talk out loud!"

Lutz simply stared back at her, his teeth clamped together tight. No words
would come from his mouth. "Aren't you even going to wish me a happy
birthday?" Andrea finally asked him.

"If you are attempting," Lutz began to say, very softly, and very, very slowly,
"to anger me, I assure you, you are succeeding."

The smile fell off of Andrea's face and she looked Lutz in the eye. "No,
Master Lutz, I am not trying to anger you. But I have to ask you a question.
How much time elapsed between the time you came out of cold sleep and the
moment you teleported here to Palma to retrieve me?"

"Less than twenty minutes," Lutz replied, no amusement whatsoever in his
voice.

Andrea shook her head, genuinely amazed. "You're good," she nodded. "I
thought it would take you at least an hour."

"I am powerful enough to teleport us both back to Dezoris, thank
you."

"That's just it, though. We're not teleporting back."

For the first time since the conversation began, the anger on Lutz's face
disappeared. His entire face fell into a frown of confusion as he spat out,
"Excuse me?"

"We're taking a space ship home."

Lutz pulled the hood of his robe over his head. The Master Esper, in his
flowing, white robes would look extremely out of place on the university
campus, that is, if anyone save Andrea were capable of seeing him. His
telemental powers broadcast a "masking signal" to the other minds in the area,
so no one else saw or heard him bring his staff before him and say, "We most
certainly are not. We are teleporting. Now."

"I'll come back," Andrea said defiantly, bringing her books to her chest and
folding her arms across them.

"Excuse me?" Lutz repeated. It was perhaps the first time in his life he had
used the phrase so frequently.

"If you teleport me back to Dezoris," Andrea said mockingly slow, "I will leave
the mansion again and come back here to Palma."

"You speak in a sarcastic tone, you consider this entire matter a joke, and you
treat me with absolutely no respect," Lutz ran down the laundry list, "but do
not condescend me, young lady."

"I'm simply telling you what will happen if you teleport me home."

"Is that a threat?"

A shrug from the Esper girl. "It's the truth."

"Then I will retrieve you again."

"Now who's being condescending?" Andrea blinked. "I'd wait until you were
asleep again, of course."

"Why do you insist on the two of us taking a shuttle home?" Lutz demanded.
The entire situation had gone from bad to worse to unbearable. No Esper, not
since Lian and Sophie on that awful first day of his reign so long ago, the day
Master Noah had died, had ever questioned his authority. "You know
we'll have to pass Mother Brain security checkpoints to do that. The whole
reason we're teleporting back is to avoid the devil's trap. We will
effectively be sitting in her lap if we take a shuttle."

"Not a shuttle," Andrea shook her head. "That will make the trip in hours.
We're taking the scenic route on a space cruiser."

At this point, Lutz did not even bother to react, he simply stared at the girl,
his eyes and face expressionless. When she said nothing, he sighed, "And may I
ask why?"

"Because when I came here, the only ship I could take was a shuttle. We zoomed
right by Motavia and I never got to take a look. I want to take a space
cruiser so that I can spend an entire day watching Motavia from the ship's
observation deck."

After a long moment of consideration, he released another sigh. "And so if we
take a space cruiser home, the 'scenic route,' you will agree to return with me
to Dezoris?"

"Absolutely," Andrea smiled.

He stared back at her smiling face, remembering the tender moment of her birth,
the exasperating moment in her classroom ten years before, and now this, and
wondered where Andrea Larson's parents had went so wrong. How had such
disrespect, such contempt for his authority been planted? Had he done
something wrong himself?

"You can consider it my birthday present," Andrea smiled, and Lutz didn't have
to peek into her thoughts to know she was smiling because she knew she
had done what no one else had done in centuries.

She had defeated Lutz.

"Let us go," he said flatly. It was good her smile was big enough for both of
them, for he would have no smile on his own face anytime soon.

- - - - - - - - - -

The last few clouds drifted into nothingness, and then, that was all that was
around them: nothingness.

They sat strapped tightly to their seats in the departure/re-entry cabin of the
space liner. Once the ship had broken free of Palma's orbit and set course for
Dezoris, they and the other passengers on board the space cruiser would be free
to return to their cabins, or to enjoy the many recreational and entertainment
activities aboard the liner. During departure, however, all passengers were
required, for safety purposes, to strap in tightly to their acceleration
seats.

Lutz scowled across the walkway towards a passenger who was reading a magazine.
The cover read "Mother Brain: What wonderful gifts does she have in store for
us in the final decade of her first 100 years?" The Master Esper thought he
might be sick, and not from the travel.

He glanced over to his left at Andrea Larson. The belligerent young lady who
had insisted on taking "the scenic route" had the window seat... and was also
blatantly ignoring it, instead immersing herself in a science magazine.
Lutz's scowl deepened...

...then disappeared, as beyond Andrea, out the window she was ignoring (out of
pure spite for him, Lutz was sure), Lutz saw something he had never seen
before: outer space.

Of course, he had seen the stars, but only when viewed from a planet. Never
when viewed close enough to touch! He was six-hundred fifty years old, and he
had lived on both Palma and Dezoris, but his method of transportation between
the two had always been teleportation. Or rather, if he had ever been
on a ship, he had been too young to remember it.

So he had never seen space up close. In fact, he couldn't remember ever having
seen anything so beautiful.

"It's beautiful..." he said aloud, his voice little more than a whisper.

Andrea looked up from her science magazine, glanced at him, then outside, then
back at him. "It's just space."

Realizing he had spoken aloud, Lutz, embarrassed, looked away from the window.
"So it is," he nodded.

Laying the magazine on her lap, Andrea smiled. "You said it was beautiful."

Lutz bit his lip. "I have never seen it before."

"You've never been on a ship?" she asked incredulously.

"No," he scowled, highly uncomfortable. "I have not."

Staring straight ahead, he did not see Andrea keep her eyes on him for a long
moment. Her smile widened, then she picked her magazine back up and continued
reading. "You're welcome."

"What?" Lutz said, turning his eyes towards her.

"I said," Andrea began, her magazine covering her mouth, but her grin evident
just by the look in her eyes, "you're welcome."

Lutz looked forward again, his eyes narrowed. This was going to be a very long
trip, indeed.

- - - - - - - - - -

By the time they had been released from the departure cabin and eaten dinner
(in almost absolute silence), it was ship's night. Though Andrea was at the
end of her Palman day, Lutz had only been awake for approximately half a day,
yet he guessed he was more tired even than Andrea. His first day awake out of
cold sleep was usually one of very little activity, mostly one of simply rest,
relaxation, and ceremony. It took time for his body to get readjusted to being
awake after ten years asleep. But today, he had given himself no such time.
He had immediately left the mansion to retrieve the escaped young Esper.

As if she could read his mind, Andrea then said, "You haven't even asked me why
I left."

"That is irrelevant," Lutz replied, glancing left and then right as they walked
down the residence corridor, passenger cabins on either side of them. His was
1029, hers was 1030, both at the far end of the hall. "Half-Espers are
forbidden from leaving the mansion."

"Let me guess: for our own good, right?"

"Mock me if you must, young lady," Lutz replied with a sigh, "but you never
witnessed an army of Dezorians on a murderous rampage, burning and killing
everything they saw."

"That was centuries ago, Lutz," she pointed out.

"The law still stands," was his flat answer.

She exhaled. "Still, aren't you even a little curious?"

"About what?" Lutz asked.

"About why I left the mansion," she nudged his arm, as if to add, Silly!
"Why would an eighteen year old Esper flee Esper Mansion on Dezoris to attend
university on Palma?"

"I don't think I want to know," Lutz said flatly. "Everything you do seems
designed to fluster me, to upset me, to make me uncomfortable, and to disrupt
the order of our society."

"Well, you're right," she nodded. "I did leave because I wanted to 'disrupt
the order of our society.'" She paused. "I want to restore power to the
Half-Espers."

And once again, Andrea Larson had left Lutz speechless.

"None of the elders would let me anywhere near your research notes," she
grumbled. "So I had to sneak in. The library is the most closely guarded room
in Esper Mansion, are you awake enough to realize that? The library! I
could throw a party for me and a hundred friends using your cold sleep chamber
as a buffet table before I could gain unrestricted access to the mansion
library."

Lutz realized he had stopped walking, and she had stopped to face him. But
even realizing that he had stopped was not enough to get him moving again.
Was this a lie? Another trick of Andrea's? A game, like back at her
university? Not about the library, of course, but about her motives. Had she
really been attending university on Palma... in an effort to help him restore
the Half-Espers' powers?

"When I finally got to your notes," Andrea went on, "I realized you were
looking for a magical explanation to the loss of powers. But I started
to think it could be something else. I think something biological
happened to destroy all our powers. All but yours, of course."

"But it was a magical event that robbed the others of their powers,"
Lutz argued. Even though his eyes had been closed when Master Noah had called
upon Lutz's power and the powers of all the other Esper students in his class
to rebuild Esper Mansion from the pile of cinder the Dezorians had reduced it
to, Lutz could still feel inside the same surge of power he'd felt that day.
The feeling of being on fire and about to explode at any moment. "I was there.
The only reason I, too, did not lose my powers is because my magic was stronger
than anyone else's."

"Maybe," Andrea shrugged. "But Esper power is a genetic trait to begin with.
Right? So isn't it possible that such incredible use of that power by Master
Noah created... well, created some kind of mutation, for lack of a better word,
that disrupted the genetic code of the other students in your class?"

"Well," she began, "my working theory is that the biological effect of what
Master Noah did was to crank up the power level of you and all the other
students in your class to a few points beyond max, then he sucked that power
right out of them and used it for what he needed to do. But that was way, way
too much power, more than any of the others were capable of handling, so their
systems just shut down in response. They just turned the power off, you see?
But you... it just sped up your growth. Made you at age fifteen as powerful as
you would have been at age thirty or forty. Maybe even more so." She
shrugged. "But that's all just a hypothesis."

After a long moment, Lutz finally snapped back to attention. His brain was
racing with new ideas. He began walking again, much faster than before.
Andrea, at his side, kept up. "We should not be discussing this in the open."
He arrived at his cabin door, fumbled with the key, opened it. "Come inside,"
he ushered her. "We have much to discuss, Andrea."

He found her the next day on the ship's observation deck, a huge area open to
space -- or at least apparently so, as the transparisteel that covered the deck
was difficult to see. Andi was standing at the very edge of the deck, her arms
folded on top of the guard rail there, oblivious to the children running around
her, and the other passengers relaxing in chairs all over the deck, and to the
sound from the restaurant, behind her a ways and on a balcony overlooking the
main floor of the observation deck.

Normally, the observation deck was moderately filled as passengers used the
opportunity to remind themselves they were out amongst the stars. With the
invisible walls and ceiling of the spacious area, one almost thought it was
possible to reach up, grab a star, and take it home as a souvenir. Now,
however, the deck was packed almost to capacity, as the ship was passing
Motavia on their course for distant Dezoris.

Over in one corner of the deck, a ship employee was speaking into a microphone,
spouting off all sorts of facts and figures about the desert world they were
now passing. "Last year," he was projecting into the microphone, his voice
filled with zest and zeal, "Mother Brain completed construction of Climatrol on
Motavia. Now all of you are familiar with Climatrol on Palma, but more than
just controlling Motavia's weather, Motavia's Climatrol will actually help
begin to reform the planet, and within a few centuries, Motavia is expected to
be a world as green as Palma."

All around him, passengers ooohed and aaahed and applauded at the
news. "Damn that computer to hell," Lutz muttered under his breath. He was
almost to where Andi stood now, but even if he had spoken at a normal volume,
she wouldn't have been able to hear him. As he got near her, he realized she
was standing raptured, not paying attention to the narration booming through
the deck, but merely staring at the sandball, which could be seen clearly in
its entirety ahead and just a bit to the left of the ship.

"Hello," he greeted her, taking a spot next to her, setting his hands down on
the guard rail.

"Isn't it lovely?" she asked him.

"Motavia?" he frowned. "If I had to pick which planet in Algo was loveliest,
I'd have to say Palma. But I was born there, so I'm a bit biased, I
suppose."

"It's not just it's physical appearance, it's terrain," Andi explained to him.
"It's the whole package. The warm wind hitting your face. Walking barefoot
through the sand. The cool waters of Odin Lake refreshing you after a long day
in the sun. The Paseo nightlife..."

"I see Palma isn't the only place you've visited," Lutz noted with a minor
frown, but most of his anger towards Andi at her leaving the mansion had pretty
much been erased by the news that she, like he, was actively trying to restore
power to the Half-Espers.

"No," Andi shook her head. "You misunderstand. I've never been to Motavia.
But I'd love to. Oh goodness, how I would love to."

Lutz looked at her, out at the planet, then back to her. Then, he chuckled.
"Why?"

"What?" Andrea snapped at him, her attention finally pulled from the planet.

"Why?" Lutz repeated. "Why would you ever want to go to Motavia?"

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Weren't you listening to anything I
just said?" she chided him. "I've read so much about it. It sounds like such
a wondrous, fascinating place. It's certainly warmer than the Alplatin
Plateau, I guarantee that." Her gaze then returned to the distant brown
sandball.

For the second time in almost as many seconds, he managed to whip her attention
away from the planet and to him. "You've been there?" she practically
shouted in his face.

"A few times," Lutz nodded, unable to restrain a smile. "But never for very
long. Most of my waking time is always spent in my study, on my work. But
every once in a while, I leave and visit Palma, to pay my respects at the
Heroine's Tomb. Whenever I do that, I usually stop on Motavia on my way back,
to also visit the grave of Sirus, an old governor of Motavia. He was a good
man, and almost a second father to my master, Noah. I try to tend his grave,
out of respect for my master."

"Where is the grave?" Andi asked. "Paseo?"

"Outside of it," Lutz nodded. "It's a very beautiful area."

"Tell me about it!" Andi eagerly asked.

"Well," Lutz chuckled, "as I said, I haven't been there much. But what I
remember the most is the sunset. The entire sky filled with red, as far as the
eye could see, and that red sun, hovering above the sand dunes..." He became
lost in the thought of him standing out in that area, grassy where he stood,
but sand everywhere else as far as the eye could see, placing the flowers on
the grave of Sirus... He shook himself back to the present. "It was the most
beautiful sunset I had ever seen."

Just as Andi had been raptured by the planet before, now she was raptured by
his words. She just stared at him for a long moment after he finished, then
she whispered, "Wow."

She reached out then and grabbed one of his hands, squeezing it gently in both
of hers. "Thank you," she told him sincerely, her voice still little more than
a whisper.

Lutz, somewhat taken aback, gave her hands a small squeeze in return. "You're
welcome, Andrea," he smiled back at her. Her eyes still hadn't left his own.
Lutz had never before noticed their magnificent green color.

Finally, with one last squeeze, Andi let go of Lutz's hand, and turned back to
stare at distant Motavia, but the smile did not leave her face. Likewise, even
after she turned, Lutz kept his eyes on her for another long moment. Brown
is a rather unusual hair color for an Esper, Lutz thought to himself,
but it suits Andrea well. Again, before that moment, he had never quite
noticed that about Andrea Larson.

- - - - - - - - - -

Lutz tapped his fingers nervously across the table. This is a mistake,
he thought, glancing at the two candles burning softly in the middle of the
table, the place setting directly to his right rather than across the table
from him. The bottle of wine, standing between the two candles. I am
acting like I am sixteen, not six hundred. But even if that were true, was
that such a bad thing?

When Lutz was fifteen years old, Esper society was destroyed and rebuilt before
his very eyes, and both on the same day. His parents and his teacher, Master
Noah, had all died that day, and at fifteen years of age he had been handed the
Frad Mantle, and with it, the literal mantle of leadership. He was expected to
lead his people, to restore their powers, and to prepare for the return of a
hellspawn one thousand years hence.

He had barely had time to be a teenager. He had never had time to fall in
love.

He cringed silently at the word, curling his left hand into a fist and resting
his chin upon it. She was on her way, he could detect her mind approaching the
dining hall. It wasn't too late yet, but it soon would be. Did he want her to
walk in and see the grim six-hundred year old leader of the Espers,
uncompromising in his rules for their society and unwavering in his own ways,
or did he want her to see the part of him that had stopped growing when he was
fifteen, the part of him that was still a teenager, the part of him that wanted
to spin pirouettes and loudly sing songs every time he thought of Andrea
Larson's smile?

And that is when Lutz closed his eyes and sighed. Masks, he spat at
himself. They were all masks, all coverings he wore to keep everyone from him.
His destiny was a painful one. He had watched his teenage friends grow old and
die, and then their great-great-great grandchildren do the same. He had
always kept up his defense mechanisms to keep from getting too close to his
people. He loved his people, for sure, cared for them deeply. It was
why he continued his quest, rather than having swallowed poison centuries
before. But he loved them at a distance, and he was alone at that
distance.

Alone, and lonely. Don't I deserve to fall in love? he asked himself
again. After all I have done, haven't I earned that much, at least?

He had been so lost in his self-reflection that he hadn't sensed her entering
the dining hall, nor seen her approach their corner, secluded table. He looked
up at her to find her simply staring at him, her jaw moving slowly, as if
unsure what to say. Standing from his own chair, he simply returned her gaze.
She cleared her throat but said nothing at first. Finally she said, "Nice
table. Bet you had to tip nicely to get this one."

"Yes, I did," he nodded, then grinned slightly and tapped the side of his head,
"or at least they thought I did."

Andrea's jaw dropped, the corners of her mouth pulling up into a smile "You did
not!"

Lutz just continued to smile, watching Andrea. He didn't know what to say.
Luckily, she did, so he let her speak to avoid an awkward silence. "This is,
uhh, a little different from our normal booth in the cafeteria. I thought
maybe you wanted to eat something a little more high class than burgers and
colas for a change, but I, uhh... I mean, I didn't expect..."

"I'm afraid I'm a little new at this, as well," Lutz shrugged uncomfortably.
"I mean, you would think, in six-hundred fifty years... But I've never...
asked... a girl on... a date..." A pause. "Before." He lowered his eyes,
having finally gotten the words out. Now he just waited for her reaction.
She was clearly uncomfortable, of that he could tell even without his
telepathy. But unwilling?

He stepped closer to her and she did not
take a step back. He grasped her chair and pulled it away from the table,
inviting her to sit. It was as good a way to prompt a response out of her as
any. If she walked away, left the dining hall...

(Returning to Esper Mansion dejected, the entire Esper society knowing that
I had asked the runaway Esper out for a date and I had been rejected, and they
would lose so much respect for me and...)

...well, he wasn't going to
think about that. If he had thought about that, he never would have got here
in the first place.

She sat down. "Thank you," she said, glancing over her shoulder at him.
There was a hint of a smile on her face.

"Of course," Lutz nodded, the words almost unable to come out of his throat.
The man who had lived for six and a half centuries then sat down for his very
first date.

- - - - - - - - - -

After the dinner, they strolled back to the ship's observation deck. At this
time of ship's night, and with Motavia behind them and Dezoris another thirty
hours or so ahead of them, the deck was practically deserted. Every chair on
the deck was empty, but instead of taking them, Lutz and Andrea instead stood
at the edge of the deck, the transparisteel dome just inches before their
faces, their eyes scanning the comets and the constellations.

"You love it here, don't you?" Andi asked him. "I forget that this is your
first trip into space."

"It's my first time for a lot of things," Lutz replied. "This is my first
date, you know."

Andi raised an eyebrow. "I know you've started to develop a sense of humor,
but get out," she said, clearly disbelieving him. "Are you kidding me,
Lutz?"

"No," he shook his head. "No, I've just never had time for those kinds of
things."

She took his hand in her own, and looked him straight in the eye. "Lutz, there
are some things that you make the time for." She squeezed his hand
once, looked back to the stars. But she did not release his hand.

"Sometimes," he started, "back at the mansion, I liked to go outside in the
middle of the night, and look up at the stars, and just..." His voice drifted
away for a moment as his mind traveled amongst the stars, his consciousness
floating from his body and spreading out into the cosmos, opening his mind to
all the wonders of the universe. He couldn't help the feeling, though, that
the most spectacular wonder was the one standing right next to him.

When he spoke again, his voice came as if from a distance. "I just open my
mind..." he barely whispered. "Soak everything in. I wonder if someday, I'll
find other life out there..."

"I'd love to be able to join you someday," he heard Andi's voice from far away,
and Lutz then did something he had never done before.

He dropped all of his walls, all of his masks, and all of his defenses and let
Andi into his mind.

He opened his mind completely to her, brought her inside it, and the gasp Lutz
heard at his side was her, learning for the first time what true telemental
power was all about. From within his mind, she was the cosmos all around her,
she experienced this complete, literal open-mindedness, and more than that, she
saw Lutz, the real Lutz, the hidden Lutz, more intimately than anyone else ever
had.

"Oh my goodness..." she whispered. Lutz closed his mind off from the world,
not all the way, but mostly, and turned to face Andi. He kept the mental link
between the two of them. "I... never imagined..." Andi said, her voice coming
in gasps. She placed one hand on the side of his face. "I can see you," she
whispered in wonder. "I can see... everything..."

He leaned forward, kissed her cheek gently. His heart pounded against his
chest. He kissed her cheek again, and again, each kiss moving closer to her
lips. She closed her eyes as he did so. Through their mental link, Lutz could
tell it was an occurrence unlike any other she'd ever experienced. Not only
could she feel Lutz's lips on her skin, but she could feel his mind in
her own, feel what was in his heart...

Lutz finally worked up his
courage and kissed her lips. He kissed her quickly then pulled away. "Oh my
goodness," she said again, then put her hand on the back of his head and pulled
him back towards her. She kissed him deeply.